Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator (8 page)

“I don’t know. Dad won’t talk about any of it. But Mom used to tell me she was never really afraid during investigations, and this sounds like it would scare anyone.”

The report, which identified the investigated property as a building on Ramsay Court in an unspecified city, described elements that were all too familiar—hot and cold spots, objects moving on their own, a heavy and overwhelming sense of doom. After cutting short their initial visit, the investigators refused to go back; they recommended the property owners seek help from religious groups or experienced psychics. “The entities entering and leaving through the portal were demonic in nature, and more powerful than we were equipped to measure or deal with,” the report summarized.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the girls’ locker room was as appropriate a place as any for a hell gate.

The report also explained that the Ramsay Court property had been abandoned for years; inside, the investigators found evidence of possible demonic rituals, including “black candles, symbols drawn on the walls and floor, drops of what appeared to be dried blood. It may have been an organized ritual meant to create a doorway or call forth a demon. Or it may have been a couple of kids trespassing and playing around, inadvertently opening a gateway.”

Another part of the report mentioned the tests the investigators performed and the measurements they took before the investigation was aborted. Most of the group’s equipment malfunctioned early on—flashlights with fresh batteries stopped working near the portal, only to “fix” themselves later on. Two digital cameras did the same. A film camera appeared to work, but the resulting negatives were blank. The tape inside an analog recorder snapped.

“Kind of like my phone,” I said to Tim as we read.

But some of the equipment worked long enough to produce results. A digital recorder picked up a hiss which had caused some debate among the society members—some wanted to consider it EVP, but the majority disagreed because no discernable voices could be heard in the static.
A sample of the sound was available for download; it sounded like a radio stuck between stations. “Digital enhancement of the hiss does not reveal any real hint of EVP, or electronic voice phenomena,” the report noted. “In a ‘normal’ haunting, we would expect to find evidence of EVP. The lack of recognizable EVP was one factor that led us to believe the entities encountered in the Ramsay Court property were not human in origin, but were instead entering our world through some sort of portal located within the house.” The investigators also recorded elevated magnetic fields and noticeable temperature fluctuations in several rooms.

The team members agreed that the entities in the Ramsay Court property were unlike anything they’d encountered before. One member was so spooked that she dropped out of the society after the investigation and refused to discuss her experience or contribute to the account.

“Oh man,” Tim said when he finished reading. “This is too cool.”

“Are you kidding? You’re scared of Buster, but you think a hell gate is cool.”

“I’m not scared of Buster anymore.”

“Then why do you always make me lead the way around the apartment?”

He scowled a little. “Come on! Demonic rituals opening up portals of evil? Maybe something like that’s going on in our school right now!”

I frowned. “It’s not cool at all. This is why people shouldn’t play around with things they don’t understand.” The idea was making me more and more uncomfortable. I remembered Mom explaining when I was little that people who didn’t really believe in ghosts and whatever were the most likely to stir up trouble with things like Ouija boards and séances. Even with friendly, harmless ghosts, you had to know what you were doing.

“Maybe Coach Lucifer’s behind the whole thing.”

“Whatever.” I didn’t want to think about Frucile holding some kind of midnight ritual in the locker room.

“I’m serious. You said everything seems to come out of the shower stalls, right? Think about it—if you were conducting a bloody ritual, you’d want to do it somewhere that would be easy to clean, right? You just turn on the water, and whoosh, the evidence goes right down the drain. You’d need one of those black light things they have on cop shows to see the residue.”

“And with a little bleach,” I mused, “even that would be gone.”

“So then why is it impossible that Coach Lucifer might be, I don’t know, holding sacrifices in there?”

“Because the idea is nuts.” In truth, it was starting to seem way more plausible than I wanted it to. “And just what do you think she’s sacrificing?”

“I dunno. Chickens? Stray cats? Students who forget their gym clothes?” Tim was getting way too into this theory. “We do get those announcements about runaways pretty regularly. Someone seems to disappear every few months, and we don’t always hear that they’ve been found. Maybe…”

“Maybe they just ran away,” I finished for him. “What would Frucile do with the bodies after these sacrifices? Stuff
them
down the shower drains, too?”

“Okay, I was exaggerating. But something could be going on, and that’s why you were feeling all that weird stuff. You can’t still think the Frucile-Lucifer thing’s just a coincidence. The name’s obviously made up. Hey!” He stood up, excitedly. “Does your dad still have his old ghost hunting equipment?”

“I don’t know. I assume he got rid of it. He’s so not into that anymore.”

“You should find out. And if he still has it, maybe you can sneak some of it into the locker room and see if you find any magnetic fields, or those electric-phenom-thingies—”

“Electronic voice phenomena,” I said.

“Yeah, those.”

“The Ramsay Court investigators didn’t find any EVP.”

“Then if you get some, you’ll know you might be dealing with a haunting instead of a portal. Either way, holy crap. Palmetto just got a lot more interesting.”

“No way.” I shook my head. “I’m not going back in that room. That thing didn’t want me there.”

“Or maybe it did,” Tim said slowly. “You said it was pulling you toward the showers, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And Coach Frucile gave you a weird look after that.”

“She’s given me several weird looks.”

“So what if the thing in the locker room wants you? What if you’re the next sacrifice?”

“Tim, that’s so not funny.” Problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure he was trying to be funny at all.

The thought burrowed into the back of my mind and stayed there. What if he was on the right track, and the reason only I could feel the thing so strongly was because it was focusing on me? Staying out of the locker room seemed smarter than ever.

But one other thing kept bugging me. Mom wouldn’t have been scared of this. She might have seen it as a challenge, but she wouldn’t have run away. She would have researched and investigated until she figured out what was going on and put a stop to it. Which meant I had to do the same.

Considering how Dad felt about anything ghost-related, I couldn’t very well just ask him about his old paranormal investigation equipment. Instead, I made a list of all the places in the apartment where he might’ve stashed it—and since the apartment was small, my list was short. I didn’t dare snoop through his stuff while he was around, but whenever he was out chauffeuring corpses in the funeral home’s hearse, I hit one of the spots on the list.

I didn’t find anything in his closet or dresser, or in the storage bins under his bed. There was no equipment hidden in the hall closet or the television cabinet, either. I even searched my own room, hoping he might’ve stored the stuff in a forgotten corner of the closet back when he was using the room as his office. Nothing.

After I’d exhausted all the possibilities in the apartment, I redirected my hunt and started poking around
downstairs. Nothing turned up in Dad’s office. I couldn’t get into one of the cabinets in the embalming room, so guiltily, I filched the key from Dad’s briefcase. All I found were jugs of chemicals. There was still the spare room to check, but it was empty except for a couple of coffins—all discontinued floor models. Dad intended to sell them off at a discount, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Coffins. Human-sized storage boxes, essentially. The very place to hide those mementos you’d rather forget about…

I couldn’t have thought of this a little sooner?

The coffins were dusty, and they showed assorted scratches and dents from the time they’d spent on display. Two were empty. But when I lifted the curved top half of the third coffin’s lid, I found some battered cardboard boxes taped shut and nestled on the faded satin.
Robin
had been scrawled on the top of each box, in thick black permanent ink, in Dad’s handwriting.

Okay, score. Even though the equipment had been Dad’s specialty, it made sense that he might have packed it away with the rest of his memories of Mom.

And tossed it all in a coffin. And people think
I’m
morbid.

I had to work fast. I expected Dad home within half an hour. That wasn’t enough time to go through the boxes,
and I couldn’t let him find me snooping in the spare room. I wanted to grab all the boxes at once, but since there wasn’t enough space in my tiny bedroom to store them all, I’d have to settle for attacking them one at a time. I could sort through the first one, then trade it for another the next time Dad was out. I tucked a box under my arm, closed the coffin, and ran back up to the apartment.

I figured the boxes couldn’t all contain equipment. There were probably all kinds of clues and stuff in them. The idea of finding out more about Mom excited me a lot more than investigating the shower room hell gate.

I opened the top flaps and found a scattered mess of papers, photographs, and assorted little things. It looked like everything had been packed quickly, without any attempt at organization.

It was how I’d pack away the belongings and mementos of a loved one I’d just lost. I bet Dad had stuffed everything of emotional value in these boxes, and he probably hadn’t opened them since. At least he had kept them, but why hang onto a bunch of memories you won’t let yourself enjoy or remember? Sure Mom was dead, but the contents of the boxes might’ve let us feel closer to her all these years.

I came across Mom’s address book, small and lavender, with a pair of cartoon owls on the cover. I remembered those owls. When I was little, Mom always made sure I wrote thank-you notes for any presents I got from friends
and relatives (even Aunt Thelma, who always gave awful, useful presents like socks and savings bonds). When I had a note ready to send, Mom would tell me to look up the address in her little book.

I found a drawing of a black cat I’d scribbled for her when I was five. I’d wanted a cat in the worst way back then, but Mom didn’t think it would be wise to trust Buster with small animals. She was afraid he’d get jealous and do something…unappealing to them.

Then I found a tangled clutter of stuff that looked like it had come straight from the top of a dresser. Dad had probably swiped it all into the box at once, just so he wouldn’t have to look at it. A silver chain, a couple of movie ticket stubs and receipts, a really ancient tube of peppermint lip balm, a single earring, a pen, a ponytail holder, a small wooden jewelry box, some change. And a single gemstone—a tiger’s eye, shiny and smooth. I remembered that stone, remembered admiring it. Mom hadn’t carried it around with her, but she kept it because she thought the brown tones were pretty. I liked the way the textures shimmered and shifted when I rolled the stone in my palm.

Dad had told me Mom’s things were gone. It was really hard not to be mad at him for keeping the boxes a secret; finding just a few small things gave me back parts of Mom I thought I’d lost.

Under a to-do list and a couple of bank statements,
I found a small, box-shaped object made of black plastic. It looked a little like an old television remote, only with knobs instead of buttons, and a dark digital screen. Okay, this had to be something important. There was a power switch on the side; I turned it on, but nothing happened. I flipped the box over and saw a battery compartment on the back. From the box’s weight, I guessed there were probably dead batteries inside.
Please tell me they didn’t leak,
I thought, opening the compartment. I was in luck.

After changing the batteries, I tried the power switch again. This time the digital readout lit up in bright green. A second later it registered a 1.4, whatever that meant. I’d need to research how to use it, but from what I’d read in the Ramsay Court account, I guessed it was probably an EMF reader, a device that measured electromagnetic fields. The presence of a ghost was supposed to cause a surge in the reading. There was only one sure way to test that theory.

“Buster!”

I heard an unholy squeal rattle from the direction of the living room. Seconds later the temperature in my room dropped. Buster screeched with joy, levitated my pillow, and hit me on the head with it. Before getting bopped by my poltergeist, I saw the EMF readout change. The number went crazy, spiking up to 18.9, then wavering back and forth between that and 12.3 as Buster moved around the room.

Buster picked up the pillow again; like a girl on a sugar high at a slumber party, he used it to whack me on the shoulder a couple of times. I did my best to ignore the smacks and watched the meter.

“Okay, Buster. Wanna play? Go get your toy. Get your squeaky burger!”

With a delighted cry, Buster left the room. The temperature returned to normal; the EMF reading settled back down to 1.4.

It worked.

A moment later, the rubber hamburger sailed into the room and landed on my lap.

Buster reentered the room with a squeal, and the reading went back up. This was way too awesome.

I switched off the detector, then squeaked the burger and threw it into the hall. “Go get it!”

Soon it flew back into the room and bounced off my arm. Buster made one of his unearthly chuckling noises.